Purple Prose by Liz Byrski Page A

skidding to a halt, honking and drivers screaming at her. At first I either drove her back or put her on the train at a small country station halfway, and someone collected her at the other end. Then even that became dicey, and from then on she could only be driven. It was like suddenly realising that a small child had acquired a new skill, and was about to squirm off the change table or climb out of a cot. One is often trailing afterwards, only what you are following is an unravelling, a movement towards unbeing, not becoming.
    Like the period of life where very young children are present, work can still be done but you never know when a crisis, a fall, a stroke, or just being unable to cope with some small task, will blast it off course. I cut back on work, stop doing journalism, delaya book, and disappoint my publisher. After much discussion, my mother bravely makes an anguished decision to sell her house so she can move closer to me, to a retirement village in Melbourne. For months I travel up and down preparing her house for sale, so many times I think my tyre marks are carved indelibly into the tarmac. We are full of hope though, as if we have defiantly swung our faces to a new future, that she will have a better life. Not long after she moves, any romance about this new life vanishes. The place offers far less help than they promise in the glossy brochures, and my mother needs far more help than any of us realised.
    Keeping someone completely independent when their capacity for independent living is fast evaporating is a huge operation. Bit by bit, I set up an elaborate care network. Far-flung siblings help, we roster phone calls, visits … Sometimes, cleaning up her flat, I am what the Irish feminist Kathleen Lynch calls a ‘care foot soldier’, but other times I am a ‘care commander’, and feel like a field officer deploying troops as I either give or get help for every aspect of her life. The government help is skeletal. An assessment of ‘low care’ means only four hours of assistance per week. It is a meaningless category, assigned when someone can merely walk to a bathroom or to a dining room. All the cosy sounding mantras of ‘ageing at home’, a geriatrician quips scathingly to me, really means ‘ageing at your own expense’. I am more preoccupied than any time since I had young children, only now I am continually anxious, scarcely able to work, and keep compulsively making long lists of what I need to take responsibility for. They keep expanding. Banking. Stamps. Underwear. Socks. I first have to find and then pay the bills discovered in disconnected piles of paper. I make up rosters to pin on the fridge so she remembers activities each day, but worry over the indignity. Mum has got lost shopping, even in a group of residents, so I online shop and have it delivered, or bring it with me. Some fellow residents are inexpressibly kind, but others are cold and censorious, perhaps fearing a glimpse into their possible future. Another resident has put in a complaint, that Mum isdishevelled. She tells one sister pointedly that, as the village is for ‘independent living’, Mum should be elsewhere. We are all livid but redouble our anxious efforts to keep Mum clean. She simply doesn’t notice, so as tactfully as possible I have to look through her wardrobe, find dirty items to throw in the tub. My sisters do the same. Then outfits are laid out each day between me and the council carers so she can wear fresh clothing down to morning coffee. Cleaning, medical appointments, dentists, specialists, aged care assessments … It takes hours on the phone each week just to organise it all, or to deal with local council bureaucracy to arrange meals-on-wheels, carers and cleaners. With frightening speed, even all that is not enough.
    After a mild stroke and a fall which lands Mum in hospital, she is told by a kind, gruff but straight-shooting geriatrician that he